Mike Israetel
speaker
1,094 appearances
5 recordings
5 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard May 2025
Mike Israetel’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
For most Americans that are either of normal weight, yes, I said that, and especially of overweight, it's probably better for their long-term health to be on these drugs than not on these drugs. That's how powerful they are. And they come with risks and they come with downsides and they come with side effects to manage, but these are generally quite tractable problems you can work through.
Whereas the drugs power in directly reducing your hunger and food drive so that you eat less, Their power in allowing you to focus better through your day and have better sleep because you're not concerned about food all the time or ravenously hungry is immense. And their way of affecting tons of other health aspects of your body is just nearly universally
I don't want to say a panacea, but it does so much good for your body that nowadays, because before it used to be before, I mean, three years ago, you try to do a diet and it's just going to be tough. And the hunger is crazy. And you go to a mixer after work and your friends are eating gourmet sushi and dipping pizza slice into the sushi. You don't even know how the physics of that work.
You just want some of it in your body. And it's so difficult. But now with this new generation of medicines. you can have a higher probability of success on any diet you choose by a huge factor. So this is the era of empowerment. And the way it works is like we now know how the medicines work.
Most of the reason they work to potentiate fat loss is just because they have what's called an anorectic drive. They just make you not want to eat as much. And then you get fuller faster, you stay fuller for longer. And for the first time in modern recorded history since the 60s, I think, The US in 2023 just saw its first dip down in obesity rates exclusively because of these drugs.
So just something to throw out there. It's a new world we're living in. We have the technology, so to speak, to do a lot of good for our bodies if we're open-minded to that sort of thing.
Yeah. Did you know that Kelly Means runs a supplement company, not as a nonprofit, but as a for-profit venture? Yeah.
Yeah. And so his critique of the pharmaceutical system as profit-driven is, to me, baffling because he's profit-driven. And he's actually selling supplements that don't go through FDA approval. And so most people on the street would be like, what's safer, something that goes through FDA approval or something that doesn't? 98% of people would be like, probably something that goes through it.
And they would largely be correct, though there are many, many problems with the FDA and the approval process I can talk about. You know, the supplements he's selling are functionally unlicensed and unapproved. And somehow he's able to claim that the FDA is putting all these drugs out that are really hurting people, but oh, but his supplements, they're the ones that are going to save your health.
I am not a big fan of that kind of thing. Outlay of opinion. I'll, I'll phrase it generously.
The price situation, I don't really particularly understand that criticism. What specifically is the criticism about the price?
Our healthcare system suffers from an insane burden of over-regulation by a humongous, humongous factor. That's definitely a problem. Part of the ways that problem presents itself is sometimes egregiously high prices for pharmaceutical medicine. But almost never are these prices actually prices people pay. These are prices charged to insurance companies.
And there's a bit of a funky thing there where you can charge an insurance company a lot more money than you can charge an individual. An individual will just be like, nah, I'm not buying that. But if you can get it approved through your insurance, they can begrudgingly approve it in some cases. And so they can pay much more money for the drug.
So in a properly competitive market oriented drug development environment, you have multiple drugs competing and a direct patient to drug purchasing pipeline with the approval of a doctor, of course. So if I'm actually able to buy these drugs out of pocket, And I see that terzapatide costs two times less than semaglutide. I'm buying terzapatide for sure.
But if I really want semaglutide, I'll pay double or whatever. The way this works in every single market ever studied is that eventually prices trend to very, very low levels because of the fierce competition of companies who make different drugs. There's also a bunch of drugs in development. In the next few years, we'll have a bunch more released.
And then Ozempic, for example, will be like four years outdated and you will almost certainly find it super, super cheap. Am I for making drugs substantially cheaper via deregulation? By God, I couldn't say any more about that. Like, absolutely. But is it some like specifically nefarious thing between Denmark and the United States? I'm not so sure that that's the case. I would be curious.
The ideal amount of money supplement or drug companies would charge you is infinity. And the ideal amount of drug they would ship you is zero. Your ideal is that they charge you nothing and give you all the drugs you want. The market finds an equilibrium somewhere between those two points. So the price issue is a technical economic discussion.
It doesn't really belong in the realm of fat loss and obesity and those kinds of conversations, though it does in the sense that we need to try to drive these costs down as cheap as possible, which means we need more innovation and more economic freedom and more competition. Those are the absolute undisputed ways to reduce long-term price without sacrificing availability or quantity.
Because governments in other countries can drive down the price by simply negotiating a lower price, but then the availability falls and very few people can get them. As a matter of fact, I have many friends in Europe who say that accessing these drugs is functionally impossible or highly unlikely for them to do. So that's a bad deal. And so the education component is a curious one.
I would say the idea that we aren't focusing on nutritional education and we are focusing on pharmaceuticals is just wrong. It's just not true. The United States has had many concerted efforts of nutritional education over as many decades. And most of them just don't do that well. I'm going to tell you why. Because most people just don't care. Most people, it's not an information problem.
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